Film: Brave new world grasped thanks to Steve Jobs

JOHN Lasseter is probably the Walt Disney for this generation. The Californian animator actually started his career at the House of Mouse before joining Lucasfilm where he worked on ground breaking CGI animation.

JOHN Lasseter is probably the Walt Disney for this generation. The Californian animator actually started his career at the House of Mouse before joining Lucasfilm where he worked on ground breaking CGI animation.

The fledgling animation division was then sold to Steve Jobs, who was between stints at Apple, and became Pixar.

Walt Disney bought Pixar in 2006 which means John is now back where he started, but as Chief Creative Officer of Pixar and Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering.

He credits the late Steve Jobs with helping Pixar to achieve greatness but says he never saw evidence of the computer genius’s reputedly mercurial personality.

“We were blessed with being with Steve. Pixar wouldn’t exist without him.

“The only thing he asked of me was to make it ‘insanely great’, the famous term he used.

“He just kept challenging us to take it further.

“Steve would kind of squint his eyes and would say ‘back when we were making computers at Apple (this is before he went back to Apple) the life span of these computers was about three years.

“At five years they were a doorstop. If you do your job right John these movies can last forever’.

“I thought ‘yeah, he is right’, because name another movie from 1938 that is seen as much today as Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’.”

After creating stories starring toys, cars, grumpy old balloon sellers, lost fish and rat chefs, Pixar has done what Walt Disney used to do best, made a fairytale.

Brave is the story of a fiesty Princess who refuses to conform to her mother’s idea of how she should behave.

“It is not a typical princess waiting for her prince to rescue her and finding true love kind of thing.

“This is a story about a family and how they are not getting along and how they learn to grow together. It is something that appeals to men and boys as well as girls.”

Kelly Macdonald voices Pixar’s first female protagonist in the film, which is set in Scotland, a place where John travelled as a student.

“I spent about two week up there and absolutely fell in love with its beauty, the traditions the customs but also the people.

“I found them so warm, wonderful, and funny.

“It’s one of my favourite places on earth.” There is an authentically Scottish cast including Kevin McKidd, Billy Connolly and Robbie Coltrane, who were encouraged to use dialect and colloquialisms – to the consternation of some studio execs who thought the film might end up needing subtitles.

“At one point we at started getting notes from different people round Disney and stuff saying ‘We don’t understand these words. Change these words so that everyone can understand’.

“We were like ‘yeah...no’.

“We love that we don’t understand but we know they are honest and true. I wanted the families and all the people going to see the movie in Scotland to look up and go ‘wow, they have captured Scotland’.